Alex was a historian by education, a translator of centuries-old scripts by training, and a savant when it came to inane trivia, which she tended to offer up without encouragement and much to the annoyance of everyone around her. Three months ago, Bran, LT, Mason, and the other three guys from their SEAL Team—now the owners of the Deep Six Salvage Company—had hired her to translate the historical documents housed in the Spanish Archives that pertained to the hurricane of 1624. They’d hoped she could give them a leg up on their hunt for the Santa Cristina.
Two weeks later, Alex had surprised them by insisting that the ringed island written about in the old documents was, in fact, not the Marquesas Keys, where treasure hunters—including LT’s father—had always assumed the grand ol’ ship went down, but their own Wayfarer Island. Then she’d surprised them further by requesting to come onboard the venture. Not to share in the treasure once they found it, but because she wanted to base her doctoral dissertation on the search for and excavation of the famed shipwreck.
At the time, Bran had thought it was a win-win situation. For room and board—which, let’s admit, isn’t much on Wayfarer Island—they got their very own on-site historian and translator, and she got a story that was sure to get the letters P, H, and D printed right after her name for the rest of her life. But now, as Alex took another huge bite of biscotti and lifted the lid on the laptop to read the email glowing there, Bran seriously considered changing his opinion on that whole win-win thing. Another thing about Alex: She was nosy by nature. She made sure to get her fingers in every pie that was ever cooked up on the island.
“I’m sorry.” He frowned. “Have you never heard of the word privacy?”
“Thursday is today,” Alex said, ignoring his question and pointing at the laptop’s screen.
“No shit, Sherlock,” was his totally mature reply. He felt color rising in his cheeks again. Damnit.
“Sooooo…” Alex dragged out the word, wiggling her eyebrows. “You planning to go see her or what?”
Bran opened his mouth to respond with Or what. His relationship with Maddy was perfect in that it wasn’t really a “relationship” at all. Sure, they exchanged emails every day—sometimes more than a dozen. Sure, they had the occasional three-hour satellite phone conversation. But the nature of the Internet and the distance between them created and maintained an inherent casualness. A natural informality. Which is exactly how I like it. He was thwarted from responding, however, when Mason asked, “See who?”
“Madison Powers.” Alex singsonged the name, making Bran grit his teeth. “Apparently, she’s camping on the Dry Tortugas tonight with three scholarship recipients.”
“Mmmph,” Mason muttered, walking over to scoop kibble out of the bag they kept beneath the farmhouse-style sink.
Woof! Woof! Meat barked in canine fervor, his claws scrabbling on the floor as he raced over to Mason, his nub of a tail swinging back and forth. The only thing Meat loved more than Mason was food. Any food. All food. Even some shit that wasn’t food.
Cock-a-doodle-doo! L’il Bastard, the rooster that had stowed away on their sailboat on a return trip from Key West, happily answered from his perch outside on the wraparound porch railing. His crowing carried inside on the sweet, salty breeze blowing through the open windows.
And that was how it’d been from the beginning. Meat barked and L’il Bastard answered with a raucous crow. Or vice versa. Which made for some really early, incredibly noisy mornings on the island.
“Mmmph.” Alex parroted Mason’s grunt. “You use that so often I wonder if I shouldn’t petition Webster to add it to the dictionary.”
After filling Meat’s bowl, Mason leaned back against the sink. By way of an answer, he crossed his arms.
Alex rolled her eyes and shook her head as if she’d never met a more exasperating man. When Bran said they’d grown to love Alex like a kid sister, he’d forgotten to mention with the exception of Mason. Alex and the big guy seemed to have taken an instant dislike of each other. And the only thing Bran could figure was that it was because Mason rarely spoke and Alex rarely shut up. A case of verbal oil meeting nonverbal water.
“So?” Alex asked, turning back to Bran.
“So what?” He scowled at her, picturing all the ways he could strangle her where she sat. Twelve…maybe thirteen. After that, his imagination failed him.
“Are. You. Going. To. See. Her?”
“No.” He hoped the one word, spoken with finality, would put a period on the end of the conversation.
He should have known better.
“But you like her, don’t you?” There was a line between Alex’s eyebrows. “I mean, there was that time one of her emails came in while I was using the laptop. I thought you were going to tear my arms off if I didn’t hand over the machine.”
“That’s not exactly how I remember it happening,” he muttered. Then, because he knew she would continue to press him, he added, “And I do like her. But that doesn’t mean I wanna drag my ass all the way to the Dry Tortugas to entertain a trio of teenagers.”
Alex narrowed her eyes. And there was another look he didn’t like. He firmed his jaw and prepared himself to patiently withstand whatever bit of irritation was about to come out of her mouth. He didn’t have long to wait.
“I call bullshit,” she said. “My woman’s intuition tells me there’s more holding you back.”
Of course there is. It was the same thing that had held him back since…well…forever. But talk of the asshole who’d supplied Bran’s Y chromosome and left him with a terrible legacy was strictly off-limits.
Bran glanced at Mason. The look they exchanged spoke a thousand words. And since Alex was nothing if not observant, she pursed her lips. “Why do I get the feeling I’m missing something here?”
“Can we change the subject?” Bran asked, but really it was more of a demand. “I think I might be breaking out in a rash.”
The look Alex leveled at him said she suspected he had the emotional maturity of a kumquat. “What is it with you men that you can’t talk about your feelings if—” The slam of the screen door stopped Alex mid-sentence.
Good. Bran wasn’t kidding about that rash. Talk of Maddy—or more precisely, talk of his feelings for Maddy and why he could never allow them to blossom and grow—made his skin crawl.
“Where the hell is everyone?” LT’s deep voice blasted from the front of the house.
Since LT’s craggy old seaman of an uncle, John, and the other three members of Deep Six Salvage had sailed their new salvage ship to Key Largo so a renowned mechanic could retrofit some specialty items onto the vessel, Bran assumed by everyone LT meant the three of them.
“In here!” he called.
Alex shot him a to be continued look.
He answered her with a false smile that said, Not on your life, then sobered when LT and LT’s fiancée, former CIA agent Olivia Mortier, traipsed into the kitchen. They were both in swimsuits, hair drenched, bare feet leaving puddles on the worn wood floorboards. Their expressions fell into a category one might call Quintessential Kid in the Candy Store.
“Would you two stop being so damned happy all the time?” Bran harrumphed, exaggerating a headshake. “It’s sickening.”
Even though Mason muttered an agreement, neither of them meant it. Bran, Mason, and the rest of their teammates were overjoyed that their former CO had met his match and fallen head over heels in L.O.V.E. If any of them deserved happiness, it was LT.
“So we were out spearfishing off the reef,” Olivia said, ignoring them. Bran cocked his head at her twinkling eyes and rosy cheeks. His sixth sense told him something was up.
“When I saw somethin’ that at first just looked like another piece of coral,” LT added, his Louisiana drawl peeking through even though he’d spent most of his formative years in the Keys.
“But it wasn’t coral,” Olivia said, near
ly vibrating. Bran imagined he could actually see those wavy cartoon lines rippling through the air around her body.
“No sir.” LT shook his head. “It surely wasn’t.”
“When we broke off the crustaceans, you’ll never guess what we found,” Olivia said.
“Not in a million years,” LT added.
“Not in a bazillion years!” Olivia crowed.
“For chrissakes! What was it?” Alex demanded.
“The hilt of a cutlass!” LT boasted, whipping the artifact from where he’d hidden it behind his back.
For a couple of seconds no one moved, no one dared breathe. Then it was like someone had pressed an ejector button. Bran, Mason, and Alex all scrambled to get a look at the relic balanced in the center of LT’s open palm. The thing was black with corrosion, but its shape and markings were unmistakable.
“Stop shoving, you big lummox!” Alex complained when Mason jostled her. The first two words held just a hint of a lisp, which Bran had noticed grew more prevalent when Alex became agitated.
“Mmmph,” Mason said, bending forward to inspect the hilt.
“Mmmph,” Alex parroted again, rolling her eyes.
“Cut the shit, you two,” LT said. “And while you’re at it, Mason, fire up a kerosene lantern. I want to get some good light on this thing. Alex, you run upstairs and grab the translation of the Santa Cristina’s manifest. Let’s see if I’m lucky or just good.”
Despite the excitement of the find, Bran felt his eyes pulled over to the laptop as if by some invisible force.
Maddy Powers…
Well, at least now he had a valid excuse to forgo a sail to the Dry Tortugas.
More like an excuse to be a lousy, no good fraidycat, an annoying voice whispered. To which he promptly replied Oh, go suck a bag of dicks, why doncha?
Chapter 2
6:21 p.m.…
“Hi!” Maddy waved to the park ranger waiting to greet her as she trudged up the steep beach of Garden Key, the main land mass among the batch of remote islets in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico that made up Dry Tortugas National Park. Tortuga meant “tortoise,” a name given to the islands by Ponce de Leon in the fifteen hundreds. A couple of centuries later, the U.S. tried to make Garden Key useful by building a fort there, but faulty engineering, illness, and the Civil War thwarted that effort, and the structure was abandoned before its completion.
Garden Key was the only place in the Dry Tortugas that was inhabited. If you considered the lonely park ranger who lived in the little cottage on the edge of the beach an “inhabitant.” From what Maddy had read, the park rangers assigned to the island only did three-month stints to ensure the isolation and loneliness didn’t get to them.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Brrr. The things one learned from the movies.
“Hello!” the ranger called, ripping Maddy’s mind away from the scene in The Shining. “Welcome to beautiful Garden Key and the Dry Tortugas!”
As Maddy extended her hand to the young park ranger—the operative word here was young; if the ranger was much more than twenty years old, she’d eat her snorkel gear for dinner—she let her eyes roam over the facade of the unfinished garrison known as Fort Jefferson. Its red bricks stood out in harsh contrast to the aqua waters surrounding it, and the little lighthouse, painted black and perched atop one corner of the hexagonal curtain wall, brought to mind an old sentry, battered by the wind and rain but still standing tall. She couldn’t wait to give the scholarship girls a grand tour tomorrow after breakfast. She’d studied up and knew all the good stories sure to inspire awe in the imaginations of her charges. But for now…
“I’m Maddy Powers,” she said, giving the ranger’s hand a firm shake before turning to watch the three teenagers trudge toward her, carrying the sleeping bags and pup tents the pilot of the floatplane had passed to them from the aircraft’s small cargo hold. “Looks like we’ll be your company for the night.”
“Glad to have you, ma’am.” The ranger nodded, grinning and flashing a killer set of dimples.
Maddy faked an exaggerated wince. “Oh, please call me Maddy. I’ve been travelin’ with seventeen-year-olds all day, so I already feel older than dirt.”
The young man made a face, and the tips of his ears lit up like the Fourth of July. Lordy, would you look at that? “I’m s-sorry,” he stammered. “I meant no disrespect, ma’am, and I can promise you th-that…”
He trailed off when he realized he’d “ma’am-ed” her again, which might have something to do with the stink eye she pinned on him. He suddenly found the sand at his feet immensely interesting and starting digging for some mysterious object with the toe of his hiking boot.
Maddy chuckled and resisted the urge to brush his hair out of his eyes and tell him he should give up trying to grow that scraggly excuse for a beard. Instead she nudged him with her elbow—Maddy met a lot of strangers but her natural amiability meant they rarely stayed that way for long. “No, I’m sorry. I have four older brothers, so takin’ folks with dangly bits to task is pretty much all in a day’s work for me. And then when I’m forced to get up before the butt crack of dawn—that’s four a.m., in case you were wonderin’—and pick up teenage girls who conspired to create an evil morning person”—she made quote marks with her fingers—“trifecta, I tend be even more persnickety.”
Her momma told her she had a gift for gab, and when she paired it with her friendly smile—like she was doing now—she was pretty good at putting folks at ease. Then again, it wasn’t ease she saw on the young ranger’s face when he blinked at her.
Are those some of his IQ points I see floatin’ out of his ears?
Uh-oh. She was pretty sure they were. And the look on the man’s face was one she knew well. It was the same one her big, dumb brothers donned anytime a woman with cleavage and fluffy Texas hair walked by. In a word: love-struck.
Or is it two words when there’s a hyphen in the middle?
Whatever. Either way she was caught off guard and—
“Oooh,” Louisa Sanchez said as she made her way to Maddy and the ranger. “I think Señorita Maddy has an admirer. Would you look at him blush!”
“Louisa,” Maddy scolded. “Mind your manners or our host here, Ranger…” She glanced at the green lettering stitched above the park ranger’s breast pocket. “Your name is Rick? So, like, Ranger Rick? Ha! Where are Scarlett Fox and Boomer Badger?”
“Who?” Ranger Rick blinked and cocked his head, the joke having landed as softly as a cow falling off a catwalk.
“Oh.” Maddy shook her head. “Um…you know, of the children’s magazine? Ranger Rick the raccoon?”
“Who?” Rick asked a second time, the tips of his ears turning red again.
“Um…” She trailed off, now feeling older than dirt and foolish. Luckily, the sound of the floatplane’s engines whirred to life and saved her from having to finish.
The smell of aviation fuel mixed with the sweeter scents of sunscreen and sun-baked sand, and Maddy waved to the pilot as he carefully backed the aircraft away from the sand and into the water. She shaded her eyes against the setting sun and watched the plane’s pontoons glide over the tops of the gentle waves for a few dozen yards before its wings caught the breeze, lifting the aircraft into a sky that was a happy kaleidoscope of pinks and oranges and reds.
Nothin’ quite like a sunset in the Keys, she thought, listening to the buzzing rotors compete with the screaming seagulls who swooped and dove and looked for their last meal before calling it a night. She turned to Rick. “So where should we set up camp?”
“You’re the only ones registered to overnight on the island,” he said. “Feel free to take your pick.”
“Ohhhh.” Maddy turned to the teenagers and wiggled her eyebrows. In good weather, Garden Key received frequent visitors via the daily fast ferry or, like Maddy and the girls, vi
a a chartered floatplane. Most people stayed for a few hours, exploring the fort and snorkeling around the old pilings, before returning to Key West. But a few camping licenses were issued for those tourists who wanted to experience a night in the middle of nowhere. Luckily for Maddy and the girls, they seemed to be the only ones brave enough to attempt it this night. “Go find us the primo spot. I’ll be there in a bit and we’ll make some s’mores.”
“Yo, I get it, Miss Maddy.” Donna DeMarco gave her an exaggerated wink. “You want the cute park ranger all to yourself.”
“Please.” Maddy rolled her eyes and shooed the girls up the beach. “I’m old enough to be his…” Not mother. “Older sister,” she finished lamely, and the girls snorted with laughter.
One thing Maddy had learned in her short time with the teens: Nothing got by them. They were all smart as whips.
Well, duh. Scholarship recipients, remember?
Right. When she’d approached her father—the owner of Powers Petroleum, the largest oil company in the United States—about starting a scholarship fund to support Houston-area girls who expressed an interest in pursuing a degree in petroleum engineering or petroleum geology, she hadn’t expected to be inundated with two hundred essays. And even though all of the applicants were deserving in some way, the three she had finally selected had really stood out on paper. When she met them, they stood out in person too.
There was Louisa Sanchez, black-eyed and dark-skinned. She was from what many would call the “bad” part of Maddy’s home city, born to parents who had emigrated from Mexico in the hope their daughter might grab hold of the American Dream with both hands and live it to its fullest.
Sally Mae Winchester was a bird-like blond girl from a tiny, rural community outside the city. Shy and timid, she had a Southern drawl thicker than Maddy’s. But underneath Sally Mae’s demure exterior were a keen mind and a desperate desire to make something of herself.
And then there was Donna DeMarco with her long, dark hair and too-wise-for-her-age eyes. Donna was a recent transplant to Houston and liked to portray herself as a tough Jersey girl. But that was just a ruse to hide her heart of solid gold. Donna’s mother had died when she was a baby, and the only way her father managed to keep food on their table was working as a truck driver. The problem was that he had debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. So Donna’s dream was to one day make enough money to support her “old man,” as she called him, so he wouldn’t have to suffer the agony of keeping his fingers wrapped around a steering wheel.
Devil and the Deep (The Deep Six) Page 2
